FOR THE
FREEDOM OF THE SEAS
CHAPTER I
THE WAY OF THE HUN
THE three-masted schooner Jonas Clinton was loafing along in a six-knot breeze some five hundred miles off the coast of France. For the time of year, the middle of October, the Atlantic in those latitudes was unusually docile and there was scarcely enough swell to slant the schooner's deck. Overhead, a moon in its first quarter was playing hide-and-seek in a bank of purple-black clouds. The night—the ship's clock in the cabin had just struck five bells—was so mild that the helmsman had not yet troubled to button his heavy reefer.
Light winds, or no wind at all, had been the Jonas Clinton's fortune for a month. The eastward voyage had been made in twenty-two days,
1
